


The Best Is Yet To Be

by roxyeisen



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 09:02:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13900731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roxyeisen/pseuds/roxyeisen
Summary: A little peek into Mulder's mind, present day. He thinks over the journey he has been on with Scully and what comes next.





	The Best Is Yet To Be

I don’t have to look in the mirror to know I’ve changed. And I’m not just talking about an increased waistline or the wrinkles around my eyes.

I would like to say I’ve grown wiser over the years. That I’m one of those men who found a settled discipline of thought. That I know what I want now and I know why I’m here. But I’m not sure it’s because I’ve gained any wisdom. I’m just too tired to beat my wings in the air anymore. What does it accomplish?

Maybe it’s why I’m quiet these days. I used to talk more. I’d go barreling into any conversation, stating my wildly unpopular and improbable opinion no matter the cost. I’d get in anyone’s face who bothered to challenge me. Usually, Scully was the only one who took me seriously enough. So I got in her face a lot. 

This worked well when we were partners. Challenging each other intellectually was my favorite part of being the Mulder part of Mulder and Scully. I loved how she stuck to her guns and stood there in all of her five feet of glory and stamped her little foot and told me I was wrong. I loved how she’d use big words and tedious explanations to prove her point. I loved how she never shied away from chasing down bad guys or standing up to authority figures when necessary. 

When I was a much younger man, I thought those days would last forever. I thought that Scully and I could have intellectual intercourse for the rest of our lives and nothing would ever have to change. It was an idealistic belief that I chuckle at now. As unrealistic as my ideas about the truth. 

I can look back now and see what happened, though I didn’t understand it at the time. Anything having to do with emotions gets lost on me. But that doesn’t stop me – or Scully – from having emotions. And when you face all that we tackled together, you pile up quite a store of them, believe me. Especially when you have two people who are happy to throw every one of those said emotions in the closet and ignore them until the closet explodes with a horrendous case of the feels.

As an older man, I consider where we came from. Like it was yesterday, I remember the first time Scully walked into my office. I knew I never, ever wanted her to leave from the moment I first saw her. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t something obvious, such as her beauty or charm. Not that she didn’t have those things, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I liked that she actually listened to me. I liked that she argued with me. I liked the way she took my painful past carefully in her confidence and never used it against me, even when it would have given her the upper hand. I liked that she stood up for me, even when it destroyed her credibility.

I remember when things started to change, too. Our system worked pretty well for about four years. Then, the telltale emotions started up. When she was terrorized by Donnie Pfaster, I couldn’t help but see her as vulnerable in many ways, tough as she liked me to believe she was. It wasn’t a great leap from that realization to start seeing her as a woman. A woman who had the usual desires women have: love, children, family. And by that point, I cared far too much about her to want her to be denied those comforts. She deserved them.

But from me? At the same time I knew I was not the man to make Dana Scully’s dreams come true, I knew I was too far gone to let her go. I needed her for survival. She kept me in check. And the rare times when she would protest, would threaten to go, I would do anything I had to do to reel her back in. I’d dangle her hopes and dreams in front of her and she’d always bite.

Now I’m ashamed of it. She really did deserve better. And I know she didn’t want it from anyone else. That was clear when she found a way to try to conceive a child, and she came asking me to be the father. She wanted the things she deserved as a woman – from me. And who was I to deny her that? I owed her that.

I think the most pivotal moment of our relationship was also the most private. So much so that we couldn’t discuss it after it happened. All of our feelings were collectively tossed in the closet – and it detonated from the pressure. It happened the night she found out her procedure to get pregnant had been a failure. 

She hadn’t asked me to wait at her apartment, but I wanted the IVF to work so much I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I ended up waiting on her couch for news. She had driven around for a while after, not knowing I was waiting for her. It was late when she came home.

I know now that I lost any hope of everything staying the same when she came home that night, and I had to look into her eyes and see her heartbreak. Emotions slammed us both, catching us off guard. We were ripe for the picking – she was ready to reach for anything that would offer comfort, and I was ready to do anything to comfort her. I don’t even know if there was really a moment when either of us decided to go for it. It seemed a given. Now I view that night as an anomaly. We were both out of character. There were no thoughts to sensibility or restraint. It was the only way either of us could handle the onslaught of emotion. After all, when it is all said and done, I’m a man, and she’s a woman.  
I’ve often wondered since then if it really was that depth of feeling that caused the miracle that occurred next.

But from that point on, it was different. People these days say sex doesn’t change a relationship. Do whatever you want, whatever you feel. Sex is just a biological appetite. But I have to disagree with this rationality, even if it makes me sound like a crotchety old man. It changes everything. Even if you never mention it again, which was our course of action. It’s like a chemical reaction that alters your brain. It made me see Scully as a woman. I couldn’t ignore her femininity, and all I wanted to do was make her happy and protect her. This came at the same time I was battling a fatal disease. I couldn’t tell her about it. I couldn’t destroy her happiness. I would find a way to get better, I was sure of it. I would take on that alien virus ravaging my brain and love for her would win out. 

In the end, I guess it did. And I truly wanted to believe it was our love that won out for her biggest hope – having a child. I chose to believe that we had created a miracle just with our desire for that miracle. After William was born, it was my only option to believe that. Nothing else sat right in my brain. It would be all wrong if Scully’s dream ended with her alien offspring helping our enemy take over the world. The story COULDN’T go that way.

Then the years followed when I was a fugitive. They started out okay. We enjoyed being together, being “married” even if we couldn’t actually file a marriage certificate. But about five years in, the old me started creeping in. Resenting that I couldn’t have that intellectual partnership with her anymore. That everything had changed, and now I was expected to put the toilet seat down or start dinner when she was working late. I felt a little bit like a slave to her moods. I resisted the fact that she was paying for my food and lodging and everything else. I didn’t feel like much of a man, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

The closet got dumped with a lot of emotions during the next few years. And it eventually exploded. I don’t blame Scully for getting up one day and wordlessly packing her suitcases. I don’t blame her for looking me in the eyes and telling me she couldn’t stand to live with me day after day in this endless funk I was in. And what could I say? She was right. I was unhappy. I didn’t want to do anything to improve my situation, and my new habit was to blame her for my problems. Even though she did everything to try to help me, right down to prescribing, purchasing and bringing me home medications that might ease my depression. And I looked her in the eye and tossed them in the garbage. Yes, if I’d been Scully, that would have been my moment to leave as well. I don’t blame her.

I don’t even want to consider the years that followed those. They were endless torture. The kind of life you imagine hell might be like. I guess it was good for me to be alone, though. I had to take a long look at who I had become and realize that I only had two options, live like that for the rest of my life or make the decision to snap out of it.

So here I am, an older man. Not an OLD man yet, but I’ve wasted so many years of my life being stubborn and avoiding that closet. Is it too late to come to terms with the fact that Scully and I really are a man and woman with normal emotions and attachment, and admit to it? This work partnership, of sorts, is so different from the partnership we had once upon a time. Now there is history. There are feelings. There’s a kid somewhere out there that we need to find and take care of, not because it’s our job, but because he’s ours.

I want to believe that I can be what Scully and William need because of my intellectual capacity – I can be smart enough to know how to take care of them. But that’s wrong. I’ve at least got enough life wisdom to realize that. Scully needs the Mulder who will be willing to put the toilet seat down and start dinner, and hold her when she’s disappointed and help her find her son. OUR son. I can’t fight against that role if I want to avoid the demons I’ve been well acquainted with. It’s not antidepressants that will keep away the darkness. It’s being what my family needs me to be, no matter how unfamiliar or uneasy it makes the old Fox Mulder still living somewhere inside me.

I’ve got to love them. It’s the only way this can end well. I’ve got to push my own desires and fears away, and be a man. A man who takes care of his family no matter what. Maybe it’s what the truth was all along. The world we live in never has a shortage of evil to fight. And by now I know that evil is evil, and it isn’t very original. But maybe the best way to fight it is just to love anyway.

And maybe it’s time to open up that closet with Scully and examine a few feelings. Make a few promises. Settle a few debts.

Strangely, this is truth I’m not afraid of anymore. I always wondered how it would end. My search for the truth. And it ends by letting it go. Letting go and letting other truths be more important.

I love Scully. And it’s time she knew it for sure.


End file.
